Smoke and ruin rose on every side as they neared Penrith. Farms lay scorched, with wildfires still spreading beyond villages that were nothing but smoking rubble. Livestock—cattle, goats, sheep, horses, and barnyard fowl—lay slaughtered in every direction while carrion crows flocked in such numbers, the sky blackened when they took wing, deafening the armored column with their raucous protests. Far worse than the livestock were the other bodies lying twisted in the late-slanting sunlight. Farmers cut down with cane knives or spears in their hands, women butchered in their kitchen gardens, skirts disarranged in violation inflicted before the killing blow. Children, rosy-cheeked boys and fair-skinned girls with their hair in long braids, had been hacked to pieces, gobbets of flesh scattered in ghastly splashes of blood.
The deeper they rode into the zone of devastation, the harder Stirling ground his teeth over rage. The Saxons, like the Vikings who would sweep down from the north in later centuries, were not averse to using the blood eagle, where a victim's rib cage was hacked open and his lungs yanked out across his back like hideous wings. Rage swept the length of the cataphracti's column. Everywhere the stench of blood and death permeated the air, thick with coppery blood, sickly sweet. The only sound was the massive clatter of horses' hooves on the stone road and the calls of the crows, interrupted in their grisly feast.
The village of Penrith still smouldered, embers flaring beneath the top layer of white ash, adding to the general stench a sickening smell of cooked flesh. At the head of the column, King Meirchion halted his horse and sat staring at the destruction for long moments, jaw muscles working and fingers knotted around his reins. Ancelotis joined him.
"You know the land better than I," Ancelotis murmured. "Where will the bastard strike next?"
Meirchion spat to one side, as though trying to spit out the taste of death itself. "He may follow the Roman road south out of Penrith, but I suspect not, as he's fired every farmhold between here and the great stone circle on the River Eden. If he cuts east between Long Meg and the Caldron Snow rapids, he could strike as far north as Wall's End, then follow the coast south to Sussex. If he fired the villages near Long Meg first, destroying Penrith last, he may have ridden south already, toward Merecambe Bay and the road that drives through south Rheged, into the Pennines, and south through Calchrynned and Caer-Lundein to Sussex."
Stirling superimposed Ancelotis' knowledge of the region and the oxhide map of the great council over his own mental map of England. "Whichever route he takes, he'll have to move fast, for he knows the cataphracti will ride hard to catch him. The borders of Wessex are closer than those of Sussex and Creoda rides with him. He could also reach Dewyr, south of Ebrauc, which would give him a Saxon haven far closer at hand and ships to return south without risking the long ride through Briton-held territory."
"We must split our forces then," Meirchion decided. "I'll take my own cavalry south, following the possible route through south Rheged. Take your own cataphracti and Strathclyde's to the east, toward Long Meg and Her Daughters. If he's raiding in that direction, you'll find evidence of it soon enough. If it's Dewyr he's heading toward, you'll have a hellish ride trying to catch him up."
On that point, both Stirling and Ancelotis agreed.
The column split, with Meirchion heading south out of the smouldering ruins of Penrith and Ancelotis riding hard east, with young Clinoch leading the men of Strathclyde behind him. Cutha and Creoda had clearly passed this way, for Ancelotis' path followed a swath of devastation sickening in its barbarity. It was nearly nightfall before they reached the headwaters of the Eden and the great standing stones of the megalithic circle known as Long Meg and Her Daughters. Smoke hung on the air, turning the sunset at their backs a lurid, blood-smeared red. The immense stones stood eerie watch above the countryside, with its squabbling, black-winged clouds of scavenging crows rising in drifts like charcoal mist in the long, slanting light. In the distance, they could hear the roar of water as the Eden gathered herself to tumble her way to the sea and the Caldron Snow rapids in the other direction snarled their way toward the lowlands of the south.
Beyond the sound of falling water, dark against the smudge of approaching night on the far horizon, smoke bellied up into the evening, clear evidence that Cutha was, indeed, riding east for Dewyr as hard as he could push his horses. The villages and farmholds in his path would have no warning before death burst in amongst them. Stirling ground his molars over the deepest and most savage anger he had ever felt in his life. Desperate as he was not to alter history, he could not witness such butchery and not hate the man responsible with a cold and knife-edged passion. Stirling found it difficult to bear, that by his failure to kill Cutha when he'd had the chance, Stirling himself had condemned these people to the ghastly butchery Cutha had gifted them with. The thought that he might already have changed history with an irrevocable failure to act haunted Trevor Stirling long after sunset, as they guided their horses deep into the smoke and shadows looming ahead.
Morgana waited for the first shocked hubbub to die down, then sent her sons with Medraut to begin packing for the journey home, and quietly took aside the young runner who'd brought the news. She poured a cup of wine for him with her own hands and guided him to a bench near the fire, gesturing for servants to bring hot food. The lad gulped almost convulsively at the wine, with a stark look in his eyes that Brenna McEgan had seen all too often, in the eyes of survivors after a bomb blast or a spray of bullets or a bottle of flaming petrol had set a block of flats alight. Both she and Morgana waited patiently for the lad to calm himself, to recover his strength and his wind, waited for him to begin eating the thick venison stew in his steaming bowl. At length, Morgana spoke, very gently. "When you are able, lad, I must know what you've seen."
He jerked a frightened gaze up to meet hers. "Isn't seemly t'tell a lady such things," he said, voice cracking with distress.
"I understand your concern. But I am a sovereign queen, Morgana of Galwyddel and Ynys Manaw, and my lands and people are also threatened. I must know the scope and depth of what our Saxon adversary is willing to inflict, before I can make decisions on how best to protect my people."
The boy thought for a moment, tears battling a hardened, old man's anger in his eyes, then he nodded. " 'Tis vile, Queen Morgana. They left alive not even one downy yellow chick in the farmyards. Burnt the fields and forests for miles, it was, and left the dead hacked into pieces. Men, women, infants in their cradles. 'Twas unnatural savage, what they did, and to every living thing that came in their way. I'd gone to the marshes to cut withies for me mother, when they came. Burnt the house and killed her and all my sisters, and me with nothing but a three-inch knife on me belt."
Tears welled up, impatiently knuckled aside. "I wanted to kill them, and would have tried, but if they were killing everyone the way they killed me mother and sisters, there would've been no one left to sound the alarm at Caerleul. So I lay in the mud with the marsh grass all round me 'til they'd gone, and ran from Long Meg to Penrith, to reach the Roman road, and everywhere I ran, there was nothing left alive save the crows." He hesitated, then asked in a voice breaking with youth and stress, "Did I do wrong, to lie in the grasses while me own family lay dying?"
Morgana smoothed the boy's lank, sweat-soaked hair back from his brow and placed a gentle kiss there. "No, lad. Hundreds of others may well be saved, because you hid in the grass to warn Caerleul. Thousands, perhaps, for once the cataphracti of the northern kingdoms begin the hunt, Cutha will be forced to fly ahead of our chargers, without taking the time to butcher every Briton whose path crosses his. 'Tis certain, God guided you to the wisest course, there in the marsh, and sent you with wings on your feet to speed the warning. Finish your stew, then, and I'll have a servant show you where to wash and sleep tonight. Were your father's people freeholders?"